CLIFTON: Well, let me tell you what happened with that poem. I went to
Walnut Grove Plantation in South Carolina in 1989 and I was the only person of color on
the tour. It's a wonderful two thousand acres, but on the tour there was no mention of
slaves. The plantation had the original furniture, and the guide talked about the
difficulty of the work for a small family, but there was no mention of slavery. Now I'm
very nosy--I want to know everything when I travel to give readings, all the gossip,
everything. I like to know what happened here, so I always ask about the people who were
here before these people? And then the uncomfortable question always is "Where
are they now?"

Well, Walnut Grove Plantation has the family burying ground, and on the sides of the
roped-off path leading to that burying ground there are crosses and rocks and other things
sitting on edge that to me clearly mark the graves of slaves. So I asked, "Why don't
you mention slaves?" The first answer was "Maybe the guide didn't want to
embarrass you." "Well," I said, "I'm not a slave. I don't know
why he would think I'd be embarrassed." Then I asked again, and the answer was,
"Maybe they didn't have any." Well, they had two thousand acres in South
Carolina in the early part of the nineteenth century. Be serious!

When I suggested that the guide check the inventory--because slaves were considered
property and were often inventoried--they discovered that the plantation had an inventory
of ten slaves, but they might have had more because women weren't counted. Now, well, I
had to find out about that! I mean, some things say, hey, like "No!" Then when I
learned that the women were not considered valuable enough to inventory, I definitely
wanted to write about that.

MOYERS: What do you want the readers to do at the end of the poem when
you change the word "here" to "hear"?

CLIFTON: I want them to recognize that only half the truth was being
told. At that time schoolchildren were taken there on field trips to Walnut Grove, and
half the children in the town were denied the knowledge that their ancestors had helped to
build that plantation. That is unjust, and I'm into justice big-time.

I read that poem in South Carolina a lot, and someone in the audience--I think she was
the director of the group which has restored the plantation--wrote me a letter saying that
she just didn't realize. Two years ago they began building a model slave cabin, and now
they are going to include all the people who lived there in the tour. So that's one poem
doing something, making a difference. Then once when I did a reading at the nearby town a
woman came up and told me that her family had owned Walnut Grove, but she had never gone
back--she was ashamed--so I said the next time I come here, we must go together. You see,
we cannot ignore history. History doesn't go away. The past isn't back there, the past is here
too.

MOYERS: Is it part of poetry's job to recover history, to proclaim it,
and to correct it when necessary?

CLIFTON: Yes. All that may be needed is that the injustice in the
world be mentioned so that nobody can ever say, "Nobody told me."